1904 Sectionized Map of the Flathead Indian Reservation
DESCRIPTION
This detailed cadastral map of the Flathead Indian Reservation was issued by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s General Land Office shortly after the reservation was formally opened to non-Native settlement under the Act of April 23, 1904.
Printed with the precision typical of federal land-survey documents of the era, the map captures a pivotal moment in the transformation of Indigenous land into allotments and publicly available parcels. It stands today as both a technical artifact of American land policy and a stark historical record of federal expansion into Native homelands.
Examining the Map
The map presents the Flathead Reservation divided into a rigorous grid of townships and ranges, each broken into numbered sections according to the U.S. rectangular survey system. Roads, rivers, and rail lines are overprinted as fine black lines weaving through the checkerboard landscape, while the eastern boundary traces the shoreline of Flathead Lake, prominently labeled at the top.
Survey township designations such as T.22N R.25W appear throughout, providing the structural framework for land identification, sale, and allocation. Though stark in appearance, the map is packed with administrative detail meant to guide settlers, speculators, and federal authorities through the precise geography of opened lands.
Annotations added by a previous user appear as faint pencil numbers along the map’s outer margins. They may correspond to township or range groupings, or may have simply functioned as quick-reference tabs for locating sections during land research.
Historical Context and Significance of the Map
The map documents the outcome of federal policies that reshaped the Flathead Indian Reservation in the early twentieth century, most notably the Allotment Era laws that divided communally held tribal lands into individual parcels. After allotments were assigned to tribal members, the remaining “surplus” lands were opened to non-Native settlement in 1909, a process initiated by the Act cited on the map. This government-sanctioned transformation had profound consequences for the Salish, Kootenai, and Pend d’Oreille peoples, including widespread loss of land, disruption of traditional land use, and increased federal control.
As a historical artifact, the map embodies both the bureaucratic efficiency of the General Land Office and the disruptive force of federal land policy in the American West. It survives as documentary evidence illustrating how cartography facilitated the legal and physical restructuring of Indigenous spaces in the United States.
CONDITION
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